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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crimson Longinus" data-source="post: 8145293" data-attributes="member: 7025508">Yes, I primarily view the roll as the measure of character's performance. (Now, I might occasionally let it flavour the world a bit if I don't have the exact details figured out beforehand, and in D&D this would likely be for the reason you mention: to avoid a supposedly skilled character looking incompetent. That one might feel a need to do so is due the system being extremely swingy; more than I would ideally like. I'd also let characters who are trained in a skill to have certain level of baseline competence at routine tasks.)And at least with the system like D&D, the roll not creating the actual setting details seems far more coherent to me. Several characters could be foraging at that same place, or same character at different times (but still in same season etc.) Certainly the same location cannot randomly appear different to different characters or at different times depending on what was rolled. Now as for your specific example, in my book 27 failing to find anything to eat would require something more than some mundane wasteland. It would require some sort of a supernaturally barren death zone where literally nothing lives or grows. And if the characters had not realised that they had wandered into such, then this roll would certainly be a great way for them to find out, and a perfect example of a situation where it makes sense to allow the roll even though the actual thing the character tries to do has no chance of succeeding. I don't know how this would work in a sort of system that requires setting explicit stakes before the roll can be made...</blockquote>

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